I finally got my tracks mastered and sent for distribution to Spotify and other platforms.
I will post in here when they are up so you can listen!
More ManiK Fox goodness for your soul:
New Track on Soundcloud! = A new track, Underground Cybernetic City.
I should have named it "Underground CybernetiK City" shouldn't have I?
Ok wait just a sec...
Done. I renamed it, thank you for your input.
Just a reminder, a shameless promotion, that I've created some new tracks that I threw up onto my SoundCloud... check them out if you'd be so kind.
https://on.soundcloud.com/jGYkF
and..
https://on.soundcloud.com/t68VT
https://on.soundcloud.com/Vxwoa
I have some news. We decided to put off the move to Indy until a year from now when we can have more money saved up. And, more time to plan and pack for it. Right now it would be a gigantic headache and we'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel.
St. Louis might be the most dangerous city in America, but we are taking precautions, and being vigilant and aware of our surroundings at all time when we're out. We will be ok until we move.
Wednesday night my mate went to go close the blinds in the other room when she noticed fire down the street. I went to look and sure enough, there was a car on fire. I figured someone had probably called 911 by then, but my mate called anyway, and the fire trucks arrived maybe 8 minutes later (and the fire had been going for 5 minutes before calling). The fire dept was able to quash the fire before it reached the building it parked next to.
The thing is, we never hear about this stuff that we see, on any blotter, or Nextdoor app, or anything. Something crazy we will see, and no one is talking about it. Never. It's an add phenomenon that we both have noticed.
In other news, one of our cats has taken a liking to climbing the shelf by the window and hoisting himself up onto the rim of the wall, under the ceiling (our walls don't go all the way to the top).
In my last post, I explained all about how I am getting into AI art, and how I felt about it. I detailed how I come up with some of the images, and showed some images too. I even gave a short list of engines that I used to generate these images. But I didn't mention... Midjourney.
That's because I hate Discord. It's, as I said below, for the children. But the Midjourney Bot is only on Discord, and I finally broke down and re-downloaded Discord so I could check out Midjourney. And... now I am addicted.
Some say it is easier to come up with that you want from a prompt, I say it is slightly better than the others, when it comes to channeling your creativity properly, but it still has it's hangups. I tried to create pictures of my cats, as an example, and only one out of 4 came out the way I had wanted it to. I had to complete the other 3 using Starryai.
Midjourney's art even looks different, unless you tell it not to. It will look like a painting. Here is an example:
I am enjoying playing around with it, but I'm not going to lose interest in the others that I like to use, either. Also, I am now creating a story using AI art, we'll see how that goes.
A few months ago I discovered an app for my phone called "Dream" by Wombo. My eyes were opened to a whole new world of Artificial Intelligence Art. But the art I was generating with Wombo looked like it was a painting, sort of abstract with paintbrush/oil strokes. I began to see different styles popping up around the internet and decided to try different engines. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc... and also using apps like Wonder, Starryai, Nightcafe, Playground.ai, Dawn ai, and many more smaller ones.
As I began to get more and more interested in it, I started playing with prompts. At first I would choose a pre-loaded style, and type in something like "fox on a bicycle" and see what would happen. Then I started seeing really specific prompts and I loved the result, so what I would do is take parts of other prompts I saw, and add them to my own to see what came out. Now I will say something like, "Red fox on shiny bicycle in the street, medium-shot, golden hour, hyper-detailed, trending on artstation, upscaling, octane render, PS and raw filter." Being very specific with what you're wanting to create, is key. And the more synonyms for an important word that you use, the better chance that word will be represented in your picture. Sometimes you'll put "astronaut with an apple" and ... where's the apple? It isn't there. So I'll put "astronaut with apple, fruit, granny smith, red apple, green apple" (if I didn't care about which color that apple was, of course).
Since my music persona I created in 2020 is ManiK Fox, I had set up an instagram for UX design using that persona. I never went through with the UX Design thing, so I had an extra Instagram account just sitting there, doing nothing. Now, why not use it for AI Art? Yes. So I have all my work up at instagram, username manikfoxlaughs, if you'd like to take a look. I enjoy participating in daily themed art, from group instagram communities like ai_art_community and others. Each day we vote on a theme, and the next day which ever theme got the most votes, we submit our version of ai art that goes best with that theme. I believe some recent themes have been donut, flower, spider, and now today's is "fear".
Here's an example of a few of my favorites that I have generated:
It wasn't until just recently I discovered the controversy and backlash against AI. Some people argue that AI is taking away from real artists' work, and soon real artists won't be able to make any money. They say it isn't fair to just type a text prompt and get art immediately. They basically are invalidating AI art.
Here is my response to that: First of all, I am doing this for my own enjoyment. I am having fun playing around with it to see what I can come up with. I am not making money or getting anything in return for these images. Second, obviously it takes a lot of time, commitment, and work to produce a quality painting using a physical medium. The value and worth of a real painting is so much greater than an internet image, no matter how you look at it. I see these instagram accounts begging for us to submit photos to them so they can get your permission to sell them as NFT, that is kinda dirty, and scammy, and no one likes it. I get asked at least once a day if I'd like to hand over my work so they can make money off them. Of course I ignore that shit. I do NOT believe that anyone should MAKE MONEY off of AI Generated art. It is not too difficult of work, a machine is creating the images for you.
TL;DR of that paragraph, is that I 100% support AI Generated Art. I do not support making money or selling them as NFT. The only people that should be making money off of their art, are physical medium artists who spend a ton of time perfecting their work, slaving over a canvas (or whatever they are using) to create something only they could ever have imagined.
That being said, as long as we are just enjoying ourselves and having fun with Ai Art, I have absolutely zero issues with it, and find it to be a cathartic, relaxing endeavor to explore.
My favorite apps to use for AI are Wonder, and Starryai. I don't "do" discord, so I am not using Midjourney and never have. It is probably the best one based on all the images I have seen, but again... I don't understand Discord. That's "for the children" as Kathleen Madigan, my favorite comedian, would say.
I will now link a few of them for you, if you, Dear Reader, would like to try it out:
Wonder on the app store, Wonder on the Play store
Google around to find some prompt websites that will give you some assistance at how to write really great ones, in order to get the image you are wanting.
And now, enjoy! I mean... I do.
One summer, of 1995 to be exact, when I was 15&16 years old, out of the blue almost, my back started hurting, really badly. Sharp stabbing pains. So my mom put me on her insurance and took me to an Osteopath. They did a fluoroscopy video thingy, and saw that my alignment on almost every vertebrae was out of whack. So they did therapy on me.
They'd first wrap me in a heated towel for 10 minutes to loosen the muscles, then they'd crack me (what they call "adjust") and then they'd apply the Jack Hammer (that's what the doctor called it, I don't know it's technical term) which would knock my veterbrae back into place. It made it hurt even worse, but they told me in time, it would feel better.
But.. after going to therapy 3 times a week for 3 months that whole summer, my mom's insurance ran out for it, and I had to stop going. It did feel better though by then, enough to not really bother me as much.
Cut to 2020. We are working remote from home, and there's nowhere to put any desk or anything to sit at for work so we stand at a kitchen island with our laptops. After about 2 months, my back started to ache. It got progressively worse, and a few times I would accidentally tweak it where it would be a sharp pain in my lumbar.
After moving to STL, we are standing at the same rolling kitchen island cart, but this time it's on concrete floors. So I put therapeutic arch support gel inserts in my shoes when I stand up to work. But my back is now completely fucked.
Every morning I wake out of bed and it's a dull ache, that subsides 40% with 3 Tylenol taken every 4 hours. It aches and aches while I work, so I put on my back brace snugly, which only relives the pain for a short time, maybe 20 minutes. So I put an ice pack on it and strap it around me to relieve the pain which only works maybe 30 minutes. Back and forth like this, all day.
And then yesterday, my back ached especially badly. I went to get ready to run on the treadmill, and as I took off my pajama pants, SNAP! Something in my lower lumbar decided it had had enough, and an extremely sharp pain coursed through the area. Now it hurts to move in certain ways. I put a heating pad to it, and ice, and that just made it feel stiff and sore.
I already have spondylosis in my neck (osteoarthritis) which makes it incredibly stiff, and, in the cold weather, very sore.
I figured by writing this down I could stop thinking about it, and focusing on the pain. Maybe if I just get it all out... get it off of my chest, it will maybe feel better. Like I have the whole story down, no need to think about it.
We'll see. I know it works for anxiety, maybe it works for pain too.
I'm not keen on seeing a doctor because I don't have enough $, even with insurance. We got to be looking for houses/apartments to move to soon, in Indy, so we don't have all the money to spend on doctor appointments for my back. I am planning on asking my upcoming GP PCP about maybe cortisone shots or something, we'll see if that helps. She might not though because one wrong move and it's bye-bye to the spinal cord. I'll still ask, though.
So there it is. I really hope doing stretches, taking tylenol, and icing/heating will eventually help.
This is my 2025 in review. I couldn't figure out what to say, really, because I have a terrible memory and I am sure I'd forget a lo...
